How to troubleshoot connectivity problems using network tools

There are two main reasons why you might receive a network failure. These two items are:

Connectivity Issues

Name Resolution Problems

Connectivity issues are one of the harder issues to troubleshoot especially in a complex network. In this post I will only be covering how to troubleshoot Connectivity issues using some of the built in network tools. At any stage if you get a successful connection just go on to the next item in the list.

Make sure you have the correct IP Address of the server

I can’t say this enough. CHECK YOUR TCP/IP configuration!! I have seen too many times where someone has entered a STATIC ip address when the address should have been handed out by DHCP or someone entered an invalid Network address. If you aren’t sure then ask the network administrator what the IP Address should be. If you are the network administrator then you should have planned things out a little bit better

Sometimes the OS or TCP/IP stack can become corrupted. An easy way to check for this is just to ping 127.0.0.1

Ping the local address. This normally looks like “ping 192.168.1.2” or “ping 10.1.1.2” etc

Ping items on the local subnet that known to be up and running

Clear the ARP cache table

Verify the gateway. You can find the gateway by looking at the TCP/IP properties or by doing an “ipconfig" (Windows) or “ifconfig” (Linux/Unix).